We performed a comparison between erwin Data Modeler by Quest and LeanIX based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Enterprise Architecture Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Drag-and-drop data modeling and reverse engineering out of databases are the most valuable features of erwin Data Modeler by Quest."
"The generation of DDL saved us having to write the steps by hand. You still had to go in and make some minor modifications to make it deployable to the database system. However, for the data lineage, it is very valuable for tracing our use of data, especially personal confidential data through different systems."
"I have worked with erwin Data Modeler for quite some time and familiarity is its most valuable feature."
"It allows us to create logical data models. We can represent a database model in business terms, which is very useful for us."
"It reduces monthly savings by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Think about a company like Costco and all of the points of sale systems in Costco, all of the systems, the applications, but if all the applications in Costco all had their own data model, trying to integrate those, upgrade them and manage their different versions of the same model throughout the store, is an absolute nightmare. It's phenomenally expensive. This helps reduce that cost significantly. I'm talking on the orders of hundreds of thousands of dollars."
"The most valuable features are the ability to reverse engineer and do model comparison. With the reverse engineering, I can understand the databases from third-party products. With the model comparison, I can track the differences between two versions of the same database."
"What has been useful, I have been able to reverse engineer our existing data models to document explicitly referential integrity relationships, primary/foreign keys in the model, and create ERDs that are subject area-based which our clients can use when working with our databases. The reality is that our databases are not explicitly documented in the DDL with primary/foreign key relationships. You can't look at the DDL and explicitly understand the primary/foreign key relationships that exist between our tables, so the referential integrity is not easily understood. erwin has allowed me to explicitly document that and create ERDs. This has made it easier for our clients to consume our databases for their own purposes."
"There is absolutely no problem with the stability."
"The most valuable features are the clean user interface and the fact sheet feature in Application Portfolio Management. The tool integrates well with ServiceNow, which is the usual CMDB platform."
"Interfaces well with downstream systems of data."
"One of the product's most valuable features is its ability to configure hardware devices."
"The solution provides a single window view of business, application, data, and technology views of the IT ecosystem."
"It offers neat visualization and referencing functionality while enabling the creation of landscape maps and showing the relationship between different applications."
"The usability is very high. It almost looks like a Facebook for Enterprise architecture, it's pretty nice. It's HTML5 based. The repository is very easy. It has 10 different ways of sorting the objects you have in your architecture repository. Maintaining new data or to add data to your repository is very easy."
"I like LeanIX's ease of use in general."
"The ability to import data and generate reports from it. That's where its power lies."
"Some Source official systems give us DDLs to work with and they have contents not required to be part of the DDL before we reverse engineer in the erwin DM. Therefore, we manually make changes to those scripts and edit them, then reverse-engineer within the tool. So, it does take some time to edit these DDL scripts generated by the source operational systems. What I would suggest: It would be helpful if there were a place within the erwin tool to import the file and automatically eliminate all the unnecessary lines of code, and just have the clean code built-in to generate the table/data model."
"I'd really like to see the PDF function become available. It would make my life much easier than what it is at the moment because whenever I need to collaborate with people that do not have erwin, I have to go through the wonkiness of going to Word and then save it from Word into PDF. There's a lot of differences between erwin 4.4 and 2020."
"We can only get licenses through partners."
"I love the product. I love the ability to get into the code, make it automated, and make it do what I want. I would like to see them put some kind of governance over the ability to make changes to the mart tables with the API, so that instead of just using the modeler's rights to a table -- it has a separate set of rights for API access. That would give us the ability to put governance around API applications. Right now a person with erwin and Excel/VBA has the ability to make changes to models with the API if they also have rights to make changes to the model from erwin. It's a risk."
"Complete Compare is set up only to compare properties that are of interest to us, but some of the differences cannot be brought over from one version of the model to another. This is despite the fact that we are clicking to bring objects from one place to another. Therefore, it's hard to tell at times if Complete Compare is working as intended without having to manually go into the details and check everything. If it could be redesigned to a degree where it is easier to use when we bring things over from one site to another and be sure that it's been done correctly, that would be nice to have. We would probably use the tool more often if the Complete Compare were easier to use."
"I am not so happy with its speed. Sometimes, it can have problems with connections."
"The navigation is a little bit of a challenge. It's painful. For example, if you've got a view open and you want to try to move from side to side, the standard today is being able to drag and drop left and right. You can't really do that in the model. Moving around the model is painful because it doesn't follow the Windows model today."
"I would like to see the reporting capabilities be more dynamic and more inclusive of information. The API is very sparsely understood by people across the user community."
"Does a poor job of being able to allocate detailed costings to components within the network."
"The initial setup has room for improvement."
"The whole integration architecture view of interfaces/data exchange could be improved."
"Another area for improvement is that when you're starting to look into more advanced information, using the solution's APIs and its customizations, documentation for that specific aspect is not very good. There is not too much support built into the offering for that aspect, for a developer."
"It's hard to predict the pricing of the system."
"I find LeanIX's pricing expensive for the functionality it offers. However, with the acquisition by SAP, the pricing might become more affordable due to scale and tiered application pricing. Currently, it offers different tiers for the first 400 applications: 400 to 600 and 600 to 1,000, making it expensive from a pricing standpoint."
"The solution uses Gartner's time-based framework for application rationalization. One more thing that you can consider is having some add-on frameworks for the same, not just Gartner."
"The modeling could be improved."
erwin Data Modeler by Quest is ranked 3rd in Enterprise Architecture Management with 37 reviews while LeanIX is ranked 1st in Enterprise Architecture Management with 18 reviews. erwin Data Modeler by Quest is rated 8.6, while LeanIX is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of erwin Data Modeler by Quest writes "The product lets users import different types of models, but it is expensive, and the interface must be improved". On the other hand, the top reviewer of LeanIX writes "Streamlines the process of identifying apps nearing end-of-life or requiring retirement and facilitates informed decisions about app retention". erwin Data Modeler by Quest is most compared with SAP PowerDesigner, IDERA ER/Studio, Lucidchart, Visio and Visual Paradigm, whereas LeanIX is most compared with ServiceNow, Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, MEGA HOPEX, ADOIT and erwin Evolve by Quest. See our LeanIX vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest report.
See our list of best Enterprise Architecture Management vendors.
We monitor all Enterprise Architecture Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
